Same asker. I phrased that badly. I don't agree with any of those propositions, but I do believe that many, if not most, prison abolitionists either do, or simply do not care. I have loved ones who work in prisons (because they are very poor; I cannot think of anyone who would choose this line of work if given another option). I have never seen a prison abolitionist suggest that their lives have any worth, or at least any worth that would not be outweighed by the goal of abolishing prisons.
Same again, please note that’s not a defense of prisons, they are very awful. But everything I see about them highlights how abusive and inhuman the staff supposedly are, and I cannot think of what they are suggesting be done with such “abusive, inhuman” people other than exterminate them.
Is it helpful to think of prison abolitionists as people who believe that, categorically, no matter what someone has done, they do not deserve to be locked up and they do not deserve to suffer and they do not deserve to die?
I don’t have any particular reason to think that the average prison staff person is a bad person outside of being in an environment that harms people, and even if the average one were they wouldn’t all be, and even if all of them were, I would like to eventually not need prison because I would like for absolutely no one ever to be locked up or murdered or harmed, because no one deserves that.
Prison abolitionism often comes from the stance that no one is bad enough to deserve prison (and that, in fact, ‘bad enough to deserve’ is a category error.)
It’s a little tougher than that, I think. Prison work (like police work etc.) tends to attract, disproportionately, the sort of people who fit most poorly into idealistic culture/social schemes: people who really like having and wielding power over others, aggressive people, etc.
Idealistic cultural/social reformers often hate people like that, and rarely have any idea what to do with them Come The Revolution. (As far as I can tell, the general hope is that they’ll just disappear somehow. This seems unlikely.)
None of which is to say that the anon’s loved ones are anything like that. But, yeah, there’s hostility towards prison staff in the abstract, and that’s not totally just because of attribution error.